Two steps backwards

In the last post you saw how a single seed of an antelope-horns milkweed, Asclepias asperula, gets carried away from its point of origin as intended, but not always with the best of landings. Before that you saw an array of seeds and fluff in their last minutes of contact with the pod that nursed them. The chaos of that release is in contrast to what came before it, which I didn’t mention then but which I would be remiss in not telling you about now. The truth is that the seeds develop in an interwoven, tightly packaged, and quite orderly way. In this picture you see a drying pod and the breeze as they’ve just begun conspiring to turn order into disorder.

I took this picture on June 25, 2011, in the same meadow that got mowed to the ground half a year later but that recovered in the spring of this year. For those of you who are interested in photography as a craft, points 1, 2, 4, 6 and 18 in About My Techniques are relevant to this photograph.

How well I remember the lecture I got as an over-eager child, wanting to pull out those seeds and let them fly. My grandfather sat me down with some pods and showed me that pulling on the seeds before they were ready often separated the seed from the fluff, making flight impossible. Patience, he counseled – Nature knows what she’s doing.

I used to break these open as a child when the milk would run out. I can remember how intrigued I was. My mother never liked cleaning me up, but seemed to understand the inquisitive act and didn’t scold me. Blowing on a dried dandelion was something quite different:-) Makes for an interesting image. (thanks for the correction on the quote author. never trust the internet w/o 2 sources)

I think a lot of children have been fascinated with milkweed, both the milk and the silk.

As for the dependability of the Internet, even two sources might not be enough, unless they’re known to be reliable. I recently came across a quotation that had been wrongly attributed to Edgar Allen Poe on dozens of websites.

I like your analysis, Lynda. There is something in photography called the Rule of Thirds, which you’ve picked up on intuitively. I’ve always had a fondness for photographs that reverse the normal order and have dark above and bright below.